From October 4-6 2012 the research group ‘Spatial Relations Contrastive German / Spanish’ (SPATREL) of the Department of English and German Philology (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain) will hold an international symposium on spatial relations in German, as well as contrastive German/English or German/Spanish.

Studies of the lexical semantics of spatial terms across languages have provided evidence of considerable variation in the details of how spatial relations are linguistically categorized even in typological similar languages. The main focus of this symposium is to explore how German encodes spatial concepts such as motion, location and orientation and to examine the cross-linguistic similarities and differences between German and English or Spanish.